– What fun that you have bees! How many hives do you have? Where are they? What bin do you have?
We’ve barely had time to greet each other before we are deep in a discussion of my three bee colonies and it is Lotte Möller and not I who is the interviewer.
Lotte Möller. Photo: Elin Åberg
It is a long time ago she was employed as a journalist – among other things, on the Newspaper We – but in a series of books she has with the journalistic nyfikenhetens method gone in depth in, among other things citronens, smultronets and begravningens cultural history. Now she has written the book “Bees and people” (Norstedts) of our intimate and at the same time, careful relationship to the bees.
– All the books I’ve written are in any way cultural history. I find a keyhole, so I can see the whole world through it, ” she says.
is placed at the university library in his hometown of Lund. Where she has sought through the centuries by beekeepers and bifilosofer. Aristotle, Virgil, Voltaire, saint Birgitta, Shakespeare and Selma Lagerlöf are just a few in the long line of authors who have written about bees.
Lotte Möller was biskötare in the beginning of the 1980s biskötare, when in robe and dish-washing gloves. At her side, she has John Larsson, who introduced her to beekeeping. Photo: Private
People have loved the lovely, aromatic, nutritious sweetness from the honey, since we are in the prehistoric time wandering over the savannah in Africa. Cave paintings in Asia and Europe show how people risk their lives high up in the trees and on the deadly rocks to access the honeybees golden drops.
It is impossible to say when the first time we placed a swarm of bees in a hive to take care of the honey and the wax in a more orderly, but the man kept bees long before we tamed horses, sheep, camels, and ducks. The egyptians were definitely beekeepers, they kept the bees in cylinders of clay, and had already learned to carry the communities on the Nile to take advantage of the different plant flowering time.
beekeeping through the centuries spread all over the world can genus honeybee also be said to have taken advantage of the man. Maybe not if you look at the individual communities, for man has not always been particularly gentle with the bees when you wanted to access the honey. Right up to the end of the 1800s it was common to smoke to death bisamhället with sulfur to reap comfortable. But few, if any, animals are so spread over the globe in such a quantity that the bees, and it is largely due to their ”symbiosis” with human beings.
Bees moving into the hive. Photo: Wolfgang Kumm / IBL BildbyrÂ
Curiosity and respect, love and horror have succeeded each other when we lifted the lid to the hives and närstuderat them. When I for the slightly warmer days that are soon to come sit on his haunches in front of flustret to my hives, it is not just for rose’s sake, but also for trying to understand me on them. How are they right now? They are so orderly, predictable and at the same time so inscrutable. What controls them? Now they leave me in peace despite the fact that I am almost sitting with your nose inside the hive. But next time – if I had been inside, and rooted in the society – they can sniff me up on the 50 meters away to attack.
superb sense of smell, there is no doubt, they are said to feel stressferomonerna from biskötaren if something goes wrong and the council is to beware of the soap and perfume prior to your visit in the apiary. The romans warned the beekeeper to drink alcohol and menstruating women did the bees sticklystna, sas it.
One of the advice is repeated during the renaissance. It is often the priests who writes. What the bees liked their kroppsdofter, we have no information about. The Swedish bishop Olaus Magnus wrote in all the cases in the middle of 1500 century, in his ”History of the nordic peoples” to ”thieves, pimps, and women should have their månadsrensning have an exceedingly detrimental influence on the bees, if they approach their hives. The relationship is the same with those who do lovemaking…”
Compared with this is the today’s biböcker jättetråkiga! No matter what time you live in applies to their time values at the bees. The funniest thing has been to read books on the 1600-, 1700 – and 1800’s, ” says Lotte Möller.
the Woman on this picture is from the 1400’s have their bees in hollow tree trunks. Photo: Gianni By Orti/REX
that stands out in the Swedish bihistorien is Samuel Polish, ł is, eleven years younger brother of Carl von Linné (who by the way gave the honey bee its Latin name Apis mellifera). After studying bees for 30 years, wrote Samuel a book about biskötsel that had a major impact: ”the Short but tillförlitelig bij-skjötsel”. Still worth reading, like Lotte Möller.
for a few years in the 80s, she also biskötare – she use the rather the term than the beekeepers. She was one day persuaded to take two cups of a biodlargubbe as she made a story about when he was caught in a swarm of bees.
No one had a bin at the time, more than a little special, quirky blokes on the country. Their language was so wonderful; the honeydew, drottningfälla, pollenbyxor, super chamber and the brood chamber. So poetic!
she herself was never any good beekeeper. She traveled too much and thought that the honey was difficult to harvest when the bees defended it.
15,000 years old grottmålningen from Spain shows a man hanging in the rope to collect honey from the bees on a cliff. The black dots are bees flying around honungssamlaren. Photo: IBL
In bisamhället appears to each individual in each moment completely clear on their tasks. When a arbetsbi crept out of the cell, where it is hatched, it starts pretty instantly clean out it and then continues for a few days as putsbi. During his five to six weeks long life will also be significant, which feeds the larvae, byggbi, which create the combs, vaktbi, which protects society and dragbi, which collect nectar (which becomes honey), pollen and water for the survival of society. During the height of summer it can be a good bit over 50,000 bees in the hive.
Bisamhället also have a few hundred or a thousand drones, whose main task is to mate with the ambient any ungdrottningar. Starring inside the hive have the queen, a little longer and more slender than the other bees, she goes methodically around on the combs and lay eggs. It can be a couple of thousand per day, more than her own weight. To manage this, surrounded she by a court of bees that constantly suits her up with protein-rich food.
the man through the story compared this intricate society is built with our own. Aristotle noted on the 300-century bc to bisamhället is governed by a king. That a society could be ruled by a woman was too difficult to imagine, so his truth remained for two thousand years.
“Neither the people of Egypt or Lydiens the vastness of the kingdom revere their king, who they are,” wrote the roman Virgil and stoikern Seneca saw bisamhället as proof that the monarchy was created by nature. Shakespeare, in turn, noted in ”Henry V” to ”they teach us how a human state should be arranged”.
A beekeeper captures a swarm at a drawing from the late 1800s. Photo: IBL
Bisamhället seemed to fit the catholic church’s worldview. The holy Antonius wrote in the 1200s: “Christ our king flew to the us from the hive, which is the Father’s chest. Him, we should follow the good bees.”
several times to the bees in their revelations: “I am God, the creator of all things. I am the owner and master. From my glowing love and with my blood, I founded my hive, which is the holy church. The christians gather together and staying in faith unity and mutual love.
political science in the beehive has continued until our days. It has long been asserted that the queen ruled his workers with his pheromones, but researcher Thomas D Seeley maintains in his book “Honeybee democracy” to arbetsbina in the high-grade evaluate various options and take collective decisions.
In the 1700s, it became increasingly obvious that you, as the queen is also called, laid eggs. But it was still hard for many to swallow. The englishman John Keys chose a classic male strategy to disparage the queen’s status and appearance: ”A clunky creature not unlike a too-tall woman in a too short robe,” he wrote.
Bees on a honeycomb. In the cells are visible larvae in various stages of development. Photo: Niklas Gustavsson
has been difficult to avoid even for the most uninterested. It has never been written so much about our dearest steklar now. When in 2006, it started to be reported about the bee colonies that collapsed and the bees that simply did not come back to the hive to spread panic among the american storodlarna. Even Europe has suffered. Likely to have stordriften of agriculture with pesticides, sterile monocultures, and the mites eventually become too much for the 0.1 grams heavy arbetsbiet.
” I can not assess how vulnerable Sweden is, but it can’t be fun to be bi in the areas with giant fields of rapeseed.
The final chapter of the book is all about natural beekeeping. When the bees get to build that they want one of their vaxbyggen organically and endlessly beautiful inside, maybe, a hollow tree trunk. But the past hundred years, beekeepers forced into their architecture in the strict rectangular frames, for biodlarens convenience and for the larger honungsskördarna. The traditional hives with frames are still by far the more common, but over the last few decades the interest has to let the bees build their own instinct of the plant.
Egyptian hieroglyphs with a bee in the middle to the left. Photo: IBL
“Yes, had I known all of this when I had bees, I would probably let them build freely in a greater extent and let them keep more of their honey instead of feeding them with sugar solution before the winter,” said Lotte Möller.
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